Thread: Patch 2.2, Accessibility, Difficulty Levels, and Throwing Away Content

Originally Posted by Tazo

There are people out there that are 'gamers' and play 50+ hrs a week...shocking I know

The point Xatsh is making is very valid. SE released a game where you can get 1-50 in less than a week, crafting jobs in 1-2 days. If their design allows you to lvl so fast and reach endgame then they better have the content at the end of that road to keep these players interested.

That's the norm now, and it will stay that way until the majority wants otherwise.
Don't get too excited for things like Wildstar, ESO, etc. There's a good chance you'll
be max level extremely fast in those as well. Same thing will happen end-game.

Not saying you mentioned those MMOs personally, those are generally speaking. The
amount of people that play 10 hours a week compared to 50 hours a week is probably
a very huge gap.

I'm enjoying FFXIV. I plan on staying for the long-haul unless they REALLY flub things up
in a real bad way. Just my two cents.

Originally Posted by Tazo

There are people out there that are 'gamers' and play 50+ hrs a week...shocking I know

The point Xatsh is making is very valid. SE released a game where you can get 1-50 in less than a week, crafting jobs in 1-2 days. If their design allows you to lvl so fast and reach endgame then they better have the content at the end of that road to keep these players interested.

That isn't SEs target audience. Yoshi has repeatedly made comments that they are targeting more casual players. So, no there is no need for them to design for that kind of player.

-That said, currently there is not content to satisfy CASUAL players, imo. I leveled slowly... have leveled a couple of jobs to 50... and still there is very little to do endgame. So, while I disagree that SE needs to bother worrying about those that devour content faster than it can be created- they DO need to work on creating enough content for their target audience.... which they haven't done, imo.

Originally Posted by Susanoh

Instanced vs. non-instanced was "dodged" by me because it is completely, 100% irrelevant to the discussion. The way to make instanced content with horizontal progression isn't difficult to imagine, it would be exactly the same as non-instanced content with horizontal progression.

Without content being competitive how do you keep people out of say the 8th or 10th raid without spiking the difficulty to absurd levels? You must understand the importance of competition in limiting people's progression through non-instanced content. When everyone can raid all the time any time how do you stop them blowing through content? Non-instanced content has a limiting factor in that things might spawn only once a week or something like that. What are you suggesting? Super long attunements, limited number of attempts, resist gear, or massive difficulty spikes? I don't know if you haven't played many instanced games beside this one, but generally the end of each tier is as accessible as the last end of each tier, sometimes even easier.

However this constant raising of difficulty actually makes nerfs necessary to a point. You can see it a lot in WoW. If literally all you want is smaller ilvl leaps whatever, but if you think you can just foist horizontal progression into an instanced game without having the content suffer for it I have to disagree. Vanilla WoW was reasonably horizontal and Naxx40 was just not reachable for a lot of people. I don't necessarily have a problem with people not being able to touch content. However I think it's sort of disingenuous for you to go "man horizontal progression SOLVES ALL THE PROBLEMS" it just doesn't you'd have a lot of similar problems and people would be less likely to play the game because you'd have to go to huge lengths to keep them out of content.

Originally Posted by Susanoh

You don't. You create good content that people want to log in and play and have a good experience doing it. Gear gated content is one of the most boring, mind numbing aspects in the MMO genre. FFXI had plenty of content made specifically for a set group rather than open world (dynamis, limbus, nuzule, salvage, einherjar) and while better equipment helped, none of it was what modern gamers would consider a "gear check," other than possibly a few very specific strategies. If you don't like me using FFXI as an example, take a look at the original Guild Wars and to a lesser extent, Guild Wars 2.

Some gear gating is going to be inevitable, but if it turns into a proverbial ladder of equipment tiers towering to the heavens with a good number of tiers on weekly lock out... well lets just say the padding against the ever feared "exit condition" starts to become a bit obvious.

Don't focus on gear checks, I mean anything that actually creates a sense of progression like some content being harder than other content, content having an attunement line, or something to control how many people can see this content. You know something that makes beating the final boss more impressive than the ones before it. What you're talking about just sounds like having a lot of content that's generally pretty accessible once you hit level cap. I only have some limited experience with EQ and it's mostly secondhand, but the reason some dragon was hard to kill was because he wasn't always there and only one group could kill him and then he'd be gone. There was some kind of limitation that forced you to work together with people, join a guild, and progress not only in gear, game knowledge, skill, group synergy, but also socially. It's all nice and well to say "Make all the content good content that people will enjoy it", but is this progression at all? I haven't played FFXI, GW, or GW2 so maybe I just don't have the experience to understand what you're talking about.

I mean obviously if you fill a game with good content that people like and want to log in to experience, well it's naturally a good game, but that's not the easy part.

Originally Posted by Susanoh

Content that is accessible once you hit end game is exactly what I'm talking about, and I personally would argue that it ends up making for a much better game in the long run.

To answer your question about whether it's "progession," if you mean in the sense that you become vastly more powerful than you were every patch, or in the sense that one piece of content leads into the next and then the next in a repeating pattern, then no, it isn't. But I wouldn't say that the power creep is really progression either. Yes, you may get 10 or 20% stronger every few months, but the mobs and bosses are also becoming 10 or 20% stronger along with you. The end result is that every bit of new content is just as challenging as it would have been had they not decided to buff both players and mobs, and all content that came before it becomes easier and over time, a complete joke. New content also may become gated by equipment, where players feel a need to collect newer items to have a shot at holding their weight. None of these make for a very good game experience IMO. On the other hand, if the same content is used in a horizontal progression method, it can still be just as enjoyable and challenging as if it were used in a vertical progression method, with the differences being that players don't feel that they're locked out of the content until they grind to get new equipment, and instead of obsoleting the existing content in the game, it adds to it.

I'm not talking about getting 10% stronger every patch but further the idea that you're always moving forward. I just don't see how you're going to create that with flat content. People will hit 50 have a choice of multiple raids, dungeons, and crafting stuff that we hope are all masterfully designed and that's the game. If you masterfully design vertical progression it can be just as fun. You're falling back too much on the game needing to be great. You just don't like gated content or power creep so you want a game without it, it really doesn't feel like there's more to it than that. What about not having power creep or gated content makes the game good? I don't like power creep or gated content either, but I like it better than the alternative of games that need to play like Korean grindfests to last.

Effectively, these are the only differences between the two methods that have a strong impact on how we actually play the game. The only other difference is in how it "feels," but I would much rather have a good game with lots of content than a game that provides an illusion of "progress" and has very little relevant or challenging content.

Well of course if one game has more content it will be better but you're just falling back into this 'good games are better' argument again. If you have a horizontal progression game with absolutely nothing to lock people out of content, how will that game last? By simply having 10 times as much content as competitors? You must see how this line of reasoning is a little unrealistic.

Lastly, creating good content that people want to play may not be easy, but creating a wealth of good content that players will want to still go back and experience even after new content has been created is something that some would want developers to strive for in an MMO, and many developers aren't even trying. You mentioned you hadn't played Guild Wars, and this was actually one of the best things about that game IMO. The level cap never raised, and equipment never crushed what came before it, and there was lots of content that players could go back and experience from launch day until the latest patch. And not just in a "hey, I'm doing things the retro way like nobody else does any more" like in present day FFXI. Last I played the game two years ago (it's a 2005 game), there were still people playing and doing content from all different time periods in the game's life. That's the type of thing I and some others would like to see developers strive for, a game with lots of content that players want to play that can stand the test of time and not be judged only by its latest patch.

I think it'd be nice if they strive for that too, however people play these games until they die, so I don't know that it's fair to point back and say "People are still playing this online so it must have had lasting power", when you've got people still playing Meridian 57 and things like that. I think the real trick for MMOs is to created a game for less than millions and millions of dollars and slowly grow content and playerbase along these lines. I don't know if a game like what you want can come out and appeal to a niche audience but also have huge AAA levels of content. I don't necessarily disagree with your intent or opinions but mostly your opinions on how they'd be logistically achieved.